Computer Science Department

Forget-Me-Not: A Desktop Password Management Program

Candace Liu

The password management program aims to help users generate and store unique and secured passwords for different occasions or applications. As security issues occur both in internet activities and daily life, poorly-structured passwords are likely to give away a user's personal information. In order to remedy the problem, this program dedicates to generate passwords for users with customized specifications. A user is allowed to choose components for his or her passwords from a group of uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols. A user is also asked to specify the least occurrence of each component by using a numericUpDown control, as well as the length of the password in the textbox format. For example, if a user wants to generate a password for his or her bank account, he or she can simply select "numbers" with specified length to be 4. In other situations where a user wants to generate a password for an email account, he or she could choose to have two uppercase letters, two lowercase letters, and make the password length seven. Therefore, the program knows the user wants at least two components of each category, and will fill out the rest of the password with either uppercase or lowercase letters. Before generating any passwords, the user is prompted to input the application's name associated with the password. This process enables the program to group and save the information so that the user does not have to remember the password. The generated passwords will be stored encrypted in the program, and the user would be able to see the application's name one by one when requested. When a user tries to use the password for an application, he or she can choose to decrypt the password by clicking on the "retrieve" button. The program aims to retrieve the decrypted password onto the clipboard, so the user can simply paste the password into the required field without seeing or even knowing it.

Each time a password is generated and stored into the program, the program will use a time-tracking system, which will remind the user to change password regularly. The default frequency for this program will be 60 days.